Fears of being robbed, assaulted, raped, or otherwise victimized on the ômean streetsö of American cities are hardly giving way, but new fears of criminal victimization are emerging as more and more Americans long on to the Internet for shopping, investment, financial transactions of all kinds (including bill payments and banking), and ordinary communication. Michael Miller (1999) commented that only a few short years ago, Americans who were thrilled with Internet chat rooms and Trivial Pursuit games were less than enthusiastic about using their credit cards to make online purchases; the industries that wanted to exploit the commercial advantages of the emerging medium joined together to create tough to break data encryption standards and protocols that would reduce this fear and the reality that it reflected. With the e-commerce hurdle a thing of the past, one might have expected that cyber crime would also vanish. This is not the case; Miller (1999) notes that online safety from privacy invasions and even worse financial and personal crimes is not assured. This report will analyze and discuss the various forms of cyber crime and their effect on Internet users, arguing that cyber crime is as difficult an elusive a phenomena to end as crime in the material world has proven to be.
Hatcher, McDannel and Ostfeld (1999) provided a lengthy analysis of what constitutes cyber crime and how this particular type of criminal activity is, and is not, similar to other types of criminal activity. Defining computer crime necessitates a recognition that such crimes can be directed against not only human beings, but also against computers (individually and in the aggregate, as networked systems owned and operated by and for the public and private sector alike).
When computers themselves are the target of cyber crime, such acts as theft of computer processor time and computerized data tend to predominate. Other criminal actions targeti...